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A sex-on-television survey from The Kaiser Family Foundation has been released (we imagine Ma, Pa, Skippy and Cindy Lou Kaiser gathering around a black and white, oak-cabineted behemoth, pen and paper in hand) and the results are disconcerting: Sex, it would appear, is everywhere, beginning with the grammar-deficient lede to this AP report:

Television these days is loaded with sex, sex, sex double the number of sex scenes aired seven years ago, says a study out Wednesday. And the number of shows that include "safer sex" messages has leveled off, it said.


There were nearly 3,800 scenes with sexual content spotted in more than 1,100 shows researchers studied, up from about 1,900 such scenes in 1998, the first year of the Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

Vicky Rideout, a vice president at Kaiser, says the number of shows that included a message about the risks and responsibilities of sex is still very small, and has remained flat since 2002.

But with "sex" meaning many things to many people, we were curious about methodology, and so inspected the full report, which is available on the Kaiser Family website.

For this study, sex is defined as any depiction of sexual activity, sexually suggestive behavior, or talk about sexuality or sexual activity. [...]

Highly infrequent behaviors that meet the definition of sexual behavior indicated above but which do not fit in such any other category (e.g. self gratification) were classified as "other."

At first we were a little confused about why self-gratification needs to be ghettoized as an "other" behavior, but then we thought about it and realized that its on-screen depiction is actually a completely separate thing from a merely implied Hilton-and-farmhand orgy (there were pitchforks and chihuahuas everywhere!) on The Simple Life.